Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.[edit]

Wikipedia was founded in 2001, and by 2003 was beginning to flourish. The editing community had grown to almost 4,000 people who had already produced more than 234,000 articles in several dozen languages. Wikipedia was still quite small, but off to a solid start.

That’s when, ten years ago, Jimmy Wales founded the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia’s bandwidth and server costs were beginning to outstrip his ability to pay for them, and it was clear that the project was going to be popular and successful. And so Jimmy created the Wikimedia Foundation with the goal of providing technological, legal, fundraising and administrative support for Wikipedia and its sister projects. Since then the support provided by the Wikimedia Foundation has enabled Wikipedia to develop into a trusted and much-beloved cultural institution and the biggest and most used repository of knowledge that the world has ever known.

If you’re reading this, you’re part of that success: thank you.

Since its launch 10 years ago, the Wikimedia Foundation has grown into an organization of just under 200 people — primarily software engineers, product developers and community liaisons. 2012–13 was a great year for us, mainly because it’s when we began to roll out VisualEditor, our long-awaited new editing functionality.

If you’ve ever tried to edit Wikipedia you know there’s a bit of a learning curve: historically editors have needed to learn wiki code before they can really start to make a contribution. Syntax isn’t necessarily hard to learn, but in 2013 people expect to be able to interact online without needing to think about the tools they’re using, and we wanted Wikipedia to meet those expectations.

Hence, VisualEditor! VisualEditor makes editing Wikipedia significantly simpler and faster, and we hope will enable new people to start contributing to Wikipedia who otherwise wouldn’t. VisualEditor is rolling out in stages across Wikipedia’s 284 language editions, and if it hasn’t arrived yet on the edition you use, it will soon. We encourage you to give it a try. If you see a typo or a small mistake on Wikipedia, please fix it, and if you know anything worth adding, please add it. Some people find editing remarkably satisfying, and we hope you will too.

We’re also particularly proud this year of the success of Wikipedia Zero, our project that forms partnerships with mobile carriers giving their customers access to Wikipedia for free on their phones. Due to Wikipedia Zero, today more than 300 million people throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East have access to Wikipedia from their mobile phones without incurring any data charges. In 2014 we’ll add Latin America to that list. Whether you are an editor or a donor (or both!), on behalf of the half-billion people who read Wikipedia and its sister projects, we thank you for your support. It’s been a good year, and we look forward to more and better in 2014.

The free encyclopedia containing more than 30 million articles in 287 languages. The most comprehensive and widely used reference work humans have ever compiled. More than 70,000 active volunteers contribute every month.

The content contained in this publication is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) unless otherwise stated. The trademarks and logos of the Wikimedia Foundation and any other organization are not included under the terms of this Creative Commons license. The Wikimedia Foundation trademarks and logos are trademarks of the Wikimedia Foundation. For more information, please see our Trademark Policy page, http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Trademark_Policy or contact trademarks@wikimedia.org.